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(dramatic music)
What's up, Wisecrack?
Michael here, and today,
we're gonna settle
one of the most contentious feuds in Hollywood
once and for all.
Marvel movies: deep or dumb?
Okay, not quite,
but if you're a fan
of both Martin Scorsese films and the MCU,
you might have felt a bit spurned
by your film dad dropping a warm one
on the thing you like.
- My concern is losing the screens
to massive theme park films,
which, I say again,
are their own new art form.
- He contends that theme park movies
are boxing out the real cinema
made by folks like Greta Gerwig
and Paul Thomas Anderson.
Now, I am not here to tell you
to like or dislike Marvel movies.
But this whole argument gets at a question
I find much more interesting.
What is this high art type of cinema
that Scorsese wants to protect,
and does it even exist?
So let's find out in this Wisecrack Edition
on Martin Scorsese versus the MCU.
And as always, spoilers ahead.
But before we get into it,
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Now, back to the show.
In case you missed the op-eds, essays, and interviews
in which Scorsese has waxed poetic
about the grim state of modern cinema,
here's the gist.
He thinks that back in the 60s and 70s,
the New Hollywood movement made the film industry a site
of artistic risk and creative revelation.
Audiences were willing to be challenged,
and filmmakers were in competition with each other
to see who could push the art form to new heights.
Think Stanley Kubrick, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola.
But according to Scorsese, this golden age is long gone,
and now popular cinema is just an occasion
to sell merchandise and build theme park attractions.
As he says in a "New York Times" opinion piece,
"The situation, sadly,
is that we now have two separate fields.
There's worldwide audiovisual entertainment,
and there's cinema.
They still overlap from time to time,
but that's becoming increasingly rare.
And I fear that the financial dominance of one
is being used to marginalize and even belittle
the existence of the other."
And the biggest symbol
of this cultural decline, apparently,
is none other than Kevin Feige's vessel
of cinematic destruction,
the MCU.
Now, to be fair,
much of Scorsese's criticism has been overblown
in the media.
He hasn't said that the filmmakers behind the MCU
should be sent to gulags for their crimes
or that those of us who enjoy these movies are idiots
who never should have been born.
But he's said things like this.
"Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it
are there in Marvel pictures.
What's not there is revelation,
mystery or genuine emotional danger.
Nothing is at risk.
The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands,
and they are designed as variations
on a finite number of themes."
So for Scorsese,
the MCU doesn't deserve the C in its name -
that is, unless we add two more Cs
for Marvel Capitalist Cultural Commodity Universe,
the MCCCU.
Now, we're not going to say
Marty's criticism isn't grounded in some reality,
but he's essentially making an age-old criticism
that there are two kinds of art:
elevated art and art for the masses,
and the latter is bad and dumb.
This kind of criticism has been lodged from philosophers
like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the 1940s,
as well as basically every pretentious person
you've ever met.
But here's the thing.
Some of the high art people love to praise
was, historically speaking, not a real thing.
Enter William Shakespeare,
the pinnacle of highbrow literary culture
who was actually a dude
who made entertainment full of dirty jokes
that were widely appealing to the illiterate masses.
Now, when I say "William Shakespeare,"
you might immediately think about a stuffy English teacher
or books that only Rory Gilmore could understand.
But Shakespeare was always for the people.
While those with money to blow could pay
for a seat at the Globe Theater,
all the common folk could pay a penny for standing room,
where they'd shove and yell and heckle the actors.
Shakespeare even calls them out in "Henry VIII,"
where he describes youth that thunder at a playhouse
and fight over half-eaten apples.
Why would you fight over a half-eaten one,
unless there was peanut butter on it?
Without saying that Marvel is modern-day Shakespeare,
it's worth noting
that mass appeal was similarly baked
into the popularity of every literary snob's preferred bard.
Even in America, hundreds of years later,
Shakespeare was still very much for the people.
At playhouses around the country,
from the theaters of Philadelphia
to the rough stages west of the Mississippi,
everyone was going to see Shakespeare productions.
And not only did everyone love his plays,
but folks from all stripes of society
could also recite their favorite lines,
much like how today,
one might recite their favorite 2 Chainz lyrics
while doing the dishes.
My favorite dish is turkey lasagna.
Even my pajamas designer.
Scholar Lawrence W. Levine paints a picture
of just how down-to-earth and non-pretentious
the theater was back in the day.
"To envision 19th-century theater audiences correctly,
one might do well to visit a contemporary sporting event
in which the spectators not only are similarly heterogeneous
but are also,
in the manner of both the 19th century
and the Elizabethan era,
more than an audience.
They are participants."
And by participants,
he means audience members doing stuff
that wouldn't even fly at a Jacksonville Limp Bizkit show.
They'd cheer and boo and throw dead geese at the stage.
This obviously wasn't limited to Shakespeare.
The term peanut gallery comes from the days of vaudeville,
where working-class theatergoers in the cheap section
would throw peanuts at performers,
and not just as a friendly reminder
to eat high-protein snacks.
Scholars like Levine have noted that the spirit,
while shocking by today's standards,
had a certain democratic flair.
The theater was a place that belonged to everyone,
but that was going to change as the 20th century dawned.
See, that's when well-to-do Americans started separating
high art from the so-called lower ranks of society,
and by that we mean they wanted
to solidify their class position and exclude immigrants.
One simple trick they used
was to remove the farce portion of productions -
that is, comedic interludes
that the masses looking for a good time loved.
Eventually, the theater turned from a place for everyone
into a place for only proper members of society.
According to Levine,
"If Shakespeare had been an integral part
of mainstream culture in the 19th century,
in the 20th, he had become part of polite culture,
an essential ingredient in a complex we call,
significantly, 'legitimate' theater.
He had become the possession
of the educated portions of society."
So the masses,
no longer welcome in the exclusive halls of theater,
filled the seats of movie theaters instead,
gathering for a more accessible type of entertainment
with much better snacks.
According to Levine,
"Now a worker could take his wife and three children
to the movies for the price of one gallery seat
at the regular theater."
I know this might sound like something that Scorsese,
the First Avenger of cinema, would love.
The nickelodeons of the early 19th century
were looked at as places for low-class bozos
who wouldn't appreciate the theater.
As high art became more and more
of a signifier of the upper class,
"anything that produced a group atmosphere,
a mass ethos, was culturally suspect."
This group atmosphere certainly describes Marvel movies,
where fans dress up and scream their heads off
when Tony Stark gets the upper hand
on the big, purple, talking scrotum.
- I am
Iron Man.
(crowd cheering)
- And like the original cinemas,
this mass appeal becomes suspicious
to the defenders of high art.
Levine writes while crediting Susan Sontag for the idea
that "the emerging distinction between high and low culture
was based in part on an evaluation of the difference
between unique and mass-produced objects."
If the specificity of a theatrical performance was unique,
then the singular film printed on celluloid
and played on screens around the country
was just an object of mass culture,
no different than the pre-packaged Twinkie.
As this tendency grew,
culture was now firmly split
into high art and popular art,
which was the type of thing
that was commercially available to everyone,
even those wearing work boots.
Indeed, a 1913 article in "The Nation" argued
that movies were "not a very high art"
and they revealed "the common predilection
of the popular taste for the lurid and the fantastic"
and required "no thought or little attention,"
which, 100 years later,
sounds like Scorsese talking about those of us
who get advance tickets for a new MCU movie.
But ironically, way back when,
it was precisely Scorsese's beloved medium
that was considered a place
for the riffraff to amuse themselves
while folks with tailored garments and opinions on poetry
occupied themselves at the theater.
Now, even if we acknowledge
that the whole idea of cultural hierarchy in America
has always been somewhat problematic
if not completely misguided,
we can still ask whether or not Scorsese still has a point
about the MCU films being uniquely damaging to cinema.
To go back to his theme park argument, as he puts it,
"Honestly, the closest I can think of them,
as well made as they are,
with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances,
is theme parks.
It isn't the cinema of human beings
trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences
to another human being."
Which would be very understandable
if all he watched was "Thor: The Dark World,"
so if that's the case, totally fair,
and sorry for bothering you, Mr. Scorsese.
While we're not sure which,
if any MCU films Scorsese has seen,
it seems like he'd at least be able to tolerate a film
like "Captain America: The Winter Soldier."
It's a straight-up political thriller
explicitly influenced by the type of 70s cinema
that Scorsese reveres so much.
The Russo brothers, who directed the film,
describe their first meeting with Marvel like this.
"We came in, sat down, and he told us
that they wanted a 70s thriller-inspired movie.
Well, we grew up on 70s thrillers.
We're film geeks. We used to watch 'The Late Show'
with our dad when we were kids.
'French Connection,' 'Parallax View.'
So the fact that it was Captain America and a 70s thriller,
it really sunk into our sweet spot."
So rather than creating an onscreen theme park,
the Russo brothers were earnestly trying
to channel these iconic thrillers
to make something that explored human psychology.
And if we're trying to find Marty an example of an MCU film
earnestly conveying genuine human emotion,
I humbly submit the "Guardians of the Galaxy" films.
Sure, they feature an anthropomorphic tree
and a blue-faced dude who has a death arrow
powered by whistling.
(Yondu whistles) (arrow whizzes)
But they're also about lost and lonely individuals
coming together, forming a new family,
and finding collective strength and courage.
And the second "Guardians" film concludes
on one of the most emotionally compelling moments
of the entire MCU.
After Yondu gives his life to save Peter Quill,
we watch a gorgeous space funeral
to commemorate his sacrifice.
If you saw that moment in the theater
and couldn't help but notice the adult man
bawling his eyes out behind you,
there is a very good chance we were at the same screening.
And I'm not sorry.
It's just a couple of examples,
but it at least shows how even
if the MCU is a multi-billion-dollar operation
run by Walt Disney's frozen head,
which is of course not hidden
under the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride,
these films are often still trying to do the types of things
that Scorsese would seemingly consider characteristic
of real cinema.
To be clear, we're not trying to make the argument
that MCU films are high cinematic art.
- They got my dick message!
- We're simply saying
that popular films are not categorically trash
and can often be pretty good,
or at least entertaining.
And this is easy to acknowledge
once we let go of the temptation
to fall into the high art, popular art distinction.
As "The A.V. Club's" Alex McLevy said
when writing about the Scorsese-MCU kerfuffle,
"Rather than attempting to return
to some gatekeeping of the canon,
criticism can retain the best elements
of poptimism in its arsenal,
making room for art and entertainment
that has been marginalized in the past
and resisting the urge to snark and mock
that which isn't attempting to do anything more
than grant some fleeting, corporate-sponsored diversion
to people's lives."
While Scorsese is undoubtedly
one of the greatest to ever do it,
even he's made some films
that don't exactly scream high art.
He's been criticized for over-glorifying violence
and being maybe a little too obsessed with stories
about Italian-Americans who like to make pasta sauce
and do murder.
He also directed a film
in which we see Jonah Hill's prosthetic penis,
which feels more Judd Apatow than Jean-Luc Godard.
And of course, his most recent film is a Netflix movie
that's 30 minutes longer than "Endgame"
and features about as much CGI for the sole purpose
of making two old guys look slightly less old.
And speaking of the artistic value of Mafia stories,
here is what high art connoisseur
and philosopher Theodor Adorno
had to say about popular films.
"In an age of spiritual disenchantment,
the individual experiences the need
for substitute images of the divine.
It obtains these through pseudo-culture.
Hollywood idols, soaps, novels,
pop tunes, lyrics, and film genres,
such as the Wild West or the Mafia movie,
fashion substitute mythologies for the masses."
Hmm.
So I guess one man's vapid mythology for the masses
is another's work of high art.
And to be clear, "GoodFellas" rips.
As one of my esteemed colleagues so eloquently put it,
"Isn't Scorsese just Marvel for Italian-Americans?"
And it's telling that here,
Adorno, another member of the cult of high art,
is criticizing Westerns and Mafia films
for doing the same type of pop culture mythologizing
that MCU movies are accused of by critics.
While we've already talked about the Russo brothers,
they aren't the only MCU directors
with some genuine artistic cred.
Taika Waititi more or less brought the "Thor" franchise
back from the dead with "Thor: Ragnarok,"
a box office and critical success.
And Waititi seems to be someone Scorsese would respect,
having made films like "Hunt for the Wilderpeople"
and "Jojo Rabbit,"
both of which received critical acclaim,
and the latter of which won a bunch of awards,
including beating out Scorsese's "The Irishman"
for Best Adapted Screenplay.
But the filmmaker who is most poised
to complicate Scorsese's criticisms of contemporary cinema
is Chloe Zhao,
who just won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director
for her film "Nomadland"
and previously won multiple independent awards
for her first two films,
"Songs My Brothers Taught Me" and "The Rider."
In many ways, Zhao represents everything
that Scorsese thinks is good about cinema,
and is set to be one of the faces
of the next generation of American filmmaking.
Oh, and she also directed "Eternals,"
a forthcoming MCU film about immortal aliens
who protect the Earth from a group of bad guys
called the Deviants,
a film she was hired to direct in 2018
before achieving any real mainstream success.
Now, did Zhao just direct an MCU film
so she would secure the Disney bag
and fund whatever hyper-specific low-budget film
she wants to make next?
Maybe.
But in a recent interview,
she sounds pretty enthusiastic
about the creative freedom she had, saying,
"I shot exactly the way I wanted to,
360 degrees on the same camera
as I did on 'Nomadland.'
Same rigs.
It's a bit surreal.
I think I got lucky in that Marvel wants to take risks
and do something different."
While we'll all have to wait until November
to see Zhao's MCU debut,
I think it's worth at least speculating
that she has the potential to be
a sort of dialectical synthesis to the dichotomy
between art and worldwide audiovisual entertainment
set up by Scorsese.
And just like how in the 19th century,
American theaters were able to appeal
to high and low culture,
maybe there's a future
where both normies and cinephiles alike
can find something to enjoy in big-budget comic book movies.
We'll give the last word
to "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" director
Peter Ramsey, who called Scorsese a god before adding,
"Marvel movies are fun and good.
Chill."
Chill indeed, Peter.
Chill indeed.
But what do you guys think?
Does Scorsese have a point about massive corporations
sucking all the soul and artistry
out of the film industry,
or is he just mad that none of us were able
to get through "The Irishman" in one sitting?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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And as always, thanks for watching.
Later.
(upbeat music)